Nancy Bruin Sanders and her sister-in-law, Kim Bruin, had this photo taken when the women went out to "Grown n' Sexy" night at the Savannah nightclub Frozen Paradise in August 2010 to celebrate Nancy's 28th birthday. Kim Bruin said Nancy broke down crying on the ride home, saying she didn't think she'd live to see her 30th birthday. (Courtesy of the Bruin Family)

Cutline 1: Nancy Bruin Sanders’ brothers and sisters gave out “stop domestic violence” pins at her memorial service. (Courtesy of the Bruin family)Cutline 2: Nancy Bruin Sanders’ brother went into the Port Wentworth home she died in the day after her body was taken out to retrieve clothes, photos and her new flat-screen TV. Her family has cut Kenneth Sanders out of all photos of Nancy and her daughters. (Courtesy of the Bruin family)

Nancy Bruin Sanders (Courtesy of the Bruin family)

Kenneth Edward Sanders (Courtesy of the Chatham County sheriff’s office)

Courtesy of the Sanders family\nKenneth Sanders

Constance Cooper/Savannah Morning NewsPort Wentworth police say Kenneth Edward Sanders, 47, stabbed his 28-year-old wife Nancy Bruin Sanders to death on July 23 in this home, which the couple bought in April 2010.

Constance Cooper/Savannah Morning NewsNeighbors and friends set flowers and cards in front of the house where Port Wentworth police say Kenneth Edward Sanders, 47, stabbed his 28-year-old wife Nancy Bruin Sanders to death on July 23.

“Fancy Nancy” and “High Booster,” Nancy and Kenneth Sanders were living the dream. They had a brand-new house with a two-car garage in Port Wentworth. Kenneth was bringing in $32 an hour working as a longshoreman. Nancy’s three daughters called him daddy.

She had a collection of Coach purses. He had a big black truck and a Harley-Davidson. They’d just gotten back from vacation in Miami.

Kenneth’s last words before hanging up on a 911 operator July 23 were about the life they had.

“I had a good job and everything, but I gotta go,” he said.

Nancy screamed for help in the background.

The call disconnected.

Their dream died.

Growing up

Both Nancy and Kenneth were the babies of their families. Doted on, family members say, maybe a little spoiled.

Nancy was the youngest of eight children. Kenneth the youngest of six.

Friends and family say Nancy was popular and outgoing from the time she was a little girl. She liked to go skating. Friends were always coming over to play at the family house on Savannah’s eastside.

Nancy graduated Savannah High School in 2000. At 19, she married Derrick Dukes, a man six years her senior. At 20, she gave birth to a daughter, and four months later, her husband went to jail after pleading guilty to multiple first-degree forgery and bad checks charges.

Nancy was involved in the forgeries, court records show. In January 2002, she pleaded guilty to nine counts of first-degree forgery. She’d helped Dukes pass several checks he’d stolen from a woman he used to date.

The checks ranged from $17 to $251 and were made out to places such as Circle K; Ace Hardware; and Underground Station, a clothing store. Nancy was sentenced to four years probation, 200 hours of community service and $1,030 in restitution payments.

Dukes was released on parole in April 2003. Almost nine months to the day later, a second daughter, suffering from sickle-cell anemia, was born. In August 2004, Dukes went back to prison for financial identity fraud and first-degree forgery.

Nancy served her husband separation papers while he was in prison; their divorce was finalized in May 2006.

Nancy gave birth to a third daughter in 2007. Her family members say the youngest child’s father is an ex-boyfriend of Nancy’s with whom they maintain a good relationship.

The same can’t be said for Dukes, who has filed for custody of his two daughters in the wake of their mother’s murder and wants them to live with him in Virginia Beach, Va. He was released from prison in December 2007.

The girls and their mother

Family members said Nancy doted on her daughters, now 4, 7 and 9 years old. They were as “fancy” as she was, always decked out in new, color-coordinated outfits, Laurel said. In restaurants, they ordered from the adult menu. They got their own salads.

Friends and family describe a generous, fun-loving woman, who made delicious daiquiris and kept them flowing when friends were visiting. She was vivacious, they say, as sweet as the frozen drinks she loved. People were drawn to her.

“She liked to laugh, and she liked to make other people laugh,” Nancy’s sister, Rebecca Williams, 35, said.

But Nancy hadn’t been herself in the months before she died, friends say. She was listless, depressed, withdrawn and hardly moving from the couch.

Cheyanne Richardson, 24, a neighbor and close friend, said she knew something was wrong when Nancy invited her over and pulled out a new purse.

The behaviors noticed by her friends possibly were related to fibromyalgia. Nancy was diagnosed with the disease, a chronic pain disorder closely associated with depression, shortly before she was killed.

Nancy made a turnaround toward the end, when she got a name for her phantom pain. Nancy got dressed up, Richardson said. She pulled the Coach bag out of the closet, took a trip to Miami with Kenneth and decided to quit her part-time job as a home health care nurse.

‘High Booster’

Kenneth, 47, was nicknamed for a prized possession, the Suzuki High Booster motorcycle he rode before he traded it in for a new Harley-Davidson.

Friends in Kenneth’s Rice Creek neighborhood in Port Wentworth said he liked to show things off — his motorcycle, his cars and a wife nearly 20 years his junior.

He was a sickly child from a sickly family. All but one of Kenneth’ five siblings are dead. So is his mother.

After stabbing Nancy more than 20 times on his 47th birthday, Kenneth called his father, Eddie Sanders, 76, to tell him what he’d done.

“He said, ‘I couldn’t take it no more,’” Eddie Sanders said.

It wasn’t the first time Kenneth allegedly stabbed a woman. In November 2006, before he started dating Nancy, Kenneth was arrested on domestic violence aggravated assault charges. According to a police report, Kenneth stabbed his then-wife, 36, under her left breast during an argument in which the woman slashed his tires.

The Chatham County District Attorney’s Office set aside the charges in May 2008, with the condition they’d be brought back if he was involved in any future domestic violence. Kenneth had gone to counseling, according to court records.

Kenneth wasn’t a violent child, family members say. He stuck close to his parents and went on the road in his truck-driver father’s big rig during summer breaks from classes.

A bout with polio as a young boy left Kenneth in leg braces. He hated them, Eddie Sanders said, and refused to go to the school for disabled children in which his parents tried to enroll him. By 8 years old, Kenneth could walk without the braces.

Despite being left with a limp, he still tried to play football in high school.

“From a baby, he didn’t want anybody to take no pity on him,” Eddie Sanders said. “That’s one thing he’d get angry about, when people would talk to him about his limp.”

Prison and a second chance

Kenneth’s family was calm and loving, according to Hollingshead, the cousin who, 13 years Kenneth’s senior, acted as a close aunt to him.

After graduating from Miami Carol City Senior High, Kenneth did a short stint in college. He decided it wasn’t for him and went to work with his father, driving a truck. He also worked for awhile at the Port of Miami.

Constance Williams, 46, is the mother of Kenneth’s twin 21-year-old sons. Williams said she spent 10 years in a relationship with Kenneth, one that began when she was 18 and he was 19. It was never violent, she said.

“We had good times.”

Kenneth also has a daughter, now an adult, by another woman.

The lure of fast money in Miami’s drug scene got the better of Kenneth, family members say.

In 1996, Kenneth was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for conspiracy to distribute marijuana.

Hollingshead said he came out a changed man — “lying, scheming, bragging, materialistic.”

“It just seems that he couldn’t shake that way of living in jail in the real world here,” she said.

Kenneth’s Rice Creek neighbor, Kodak Marrero, 32, tried to help him shake it. Sometimes, the friends would be pumping iron in Marrero’s garage, and Kenneth would say Marrero wasn’t doing it right. He’d show him how he learned to lift weights in prison.

Marrero told him to stop. He had to let that time go.

Kenneth was released from prison in 2003. He moved to Savannah with a childhood friend from Miami, after a short stint in Brunswick, to try to find work at the Port of Savannah.

“He tried hard to make a difference in his life when he got out of prison,” Kenneth’s cousin, Sheila Barbour, 51, said. “He constantly talked about how he didn’t have any more prison in him. He couldn’t do no more time.”

That first year was tough, family members said. Kenneth spent part of it sleeping in his car, but he got a job as a longshoreman and started to climb the union ranks.

Then he met Nancy.

A life together

Kenneth and Nancy met in the parking lot of Allen Apartments on Savannah’s westside in 2008. He was living next door to one of her sisters.

There were problems right from the start, family and friends say. The couple argued frequently and pulled family members into their arguments.

“It was over before it started,” Nancy’s sister-in-law, Kim Bruin, 40, said.

Still, after dating for a year, Nancy and Kenneth wed at the Chatham County Courthouse in April 2009. A large reception was held at the clubhouse at Lake Shore subdivision, where Tim and Kim Bruin lived.

Nancy wore a white dress. One of Kenneth’s friends from the dock DJ’ed. Kenneth and Nancy’s families made the food themselves. Barbour cooked 14 bunches of fresh collard greens and four hams.

Also in April, the couple closed on a new 1,592-square-foot house they bought for $140,000 in the Rice Creek subdivision.

Nancy’s family said Kenneth was controlling and possessive. She’d catch him on the phone with friends calling her a party girl, complaining about their marital problems.

“My sister couldn’t breathe,” Laurel, Nancy’s sister, said. “If she came to my mama’s house, he would be ringing her phone off the hook.”

If she was asleep and missed the call, he’d come over.

Kenneth’s friends say he was fixated on his wife.

Ronnie Hamilton, 42, lived across the street from the couple and was close to Kenneth. Hamilton said Kenneth liked it when Nancy, 28, would “entertain” his friends. Nothing made him prouder than having her bring out the beers.

But being spoiled was driving the family into a financial hole. A month and a half before Nancy was stabbed to death, Lendmark Financial Services filed a lawsuit against Kenneth for non-payment of a $2,137 debt.

According to Hamilton, Kenneth was deeply in the red and worried, having fallen behind on bills after being arrested on charges he sexually assaulted a teenage relative of Nancy’s when the girl spent the night at their house in June 2010.

The arrest led Kenneth and Nancy to separate for more than six months.

Details on the assault are murky. The girl said Kenneth tried to molest her while she was sleeping in a bed with Nancy’s toddler. Nancy called police.

Kenneth went on the lam for three days before being arrested on sexual battery charges June 9, 2010. He was released on a $7,500 bond two days later. Port Wentworth Police Chief Matt Libby said the charges were pleaded down to disorderly conduct because of a lack of physical evidence.

Nancy went to the police station the day Kenneth was arrested to report that he’d bitten her on April 16. She said the bite was bad enough to leave scars and that he also threatened her with a knife. She got a family violence protective order, which barred Kenneth from contacting her and her daughters and required him to pay $1,300 a month in child support.

Nancy moved to a townhouse in Rice Hope. Her friends and family encouraged her to stay away from Kenneth.

“I told her, ‘Don’t let that house be the death of you,’” Hollingshead, Kenneth’s cousin, said.

Hollingshead became close to Nancy over the course of their marriage. Nancy called her “auntie.” Hollingshead said she feared for Nancy’s safety.

Kenneth’s friends told him he and Nancy should stay apart. The relationship wasn’t good for him, they said.

Kim Bruin said Nancy contacted Kenneth because he wasn’t paying child support as ordered. Over several weeks, their relationship re-kindled, and when Kenneth was injured in a wreck at the dock early this year, Nancy moved back in to take care of him.

“She was willing to forgive him for the things that he did,” Kim Bruin said. “She just wanted to make the relationship work.”

Nancy’s last birthday

Having been raised Jehovah’s Witness, Nancy didn’t celebrate her birthdays, as her faith prohibited it. But Kim Bruin says that on the weekend of Nancy’s final birthday, in September 2010, they went out to celebrate at Kim’s insistence. The sisters-in-law met up with a group of girlfriends and went to the Savannah nightclub Frozen Paradise for Grown & Sexy night.

They had a great time, Kim Bruin said, dancing and posing for a birthday picture shot by a professional photographer. But on the ride home to Port Wentworth, Nancy started crying.

“I just don’t feel that I’m going to make it to my 30th birthday,” she told Kim Bruin. “I just pray that my kids are going to be all right.”

Nancy was the type of person who looked for signs, friends say. And that night, Nancy had run into all the same people she saw on New Year’s Eve 2002, the day her nephew, 19-year-old Michael Ponder, was shot to death as he tried to rob a convenience store on Savannah’s eastside.

Nancy would’ve turned 29 Saturday.

The murder

On July 23, Nancy went to Sam’s Club and made the last purchase of her life — a cake for her husband’s 47th birthday. It was a big cake, with blue ruffles and Kenneth’s name in blue letters.

She didn’t have any money for a present, so she scrubbed down her husband’s Harley-Davidson the day before as a birthday gift. Kenneth took the Harley out to a car show that afternoon.

Port Wentworth police say the couple started arguing over the phone after he left, according to statements given by Nancy’s daughters. The girls didn’t remember why they were arguing.

About 5 p.m., Kenneth came home. Nancy was sitting on the couch with the 4-year-old on her lap. The girls told police Kenneth walked in, pulled out a knife and told his wife, “We’re both going to die tonight.”

Then he started stabbing her.

“Me and my wife had a fight on my birthday. And just a lot of stuff is going on,” Kenneth told the 911 operator after asking her for help at 49 Old Mill Road. “... Me and my wife is going to die together. I can’t do no more time in prison.”

The girls ran to neighbors’ homes, leaving a trail of blood as they frantically knocked on doors trying to find help. LaVonya Oliver, Hamilton’s 20-year-old stepdaughter, answered the door. The girls had blood splattered across their faces. They’d seen everything.

Oliver called Hamilton, who was at work 10 minutes away. Hamilton assumed the girls had some accident while they were out playing. He called Kenneth’s cell phone to let him know.

“He said, ‘Nancy’s on the floor next to me dead.’ He just sounded like it rolled of his tongue without any emotion at all.”

Kenneth told Hamilton he was going to kill himself, but that he might reconsider if the police let him talk to Hamilton. Hamilton rushed over.

Police got there first. They found Nancy dead in the living room, and Kenneth laying with his back to her, according to a police report. He had a knife to his throat and was threatening to kill himself. Police had to shoot him twice with a Taser before he’d drop the knife.

49 Old Mill Road

Kenneth is being held at the Chatham County jail without bond, charged with murder, aggravated assault, possession of a knife in committing a crime and cruelty to children. He’s been transferred out of the mental health unit but is being kept separate from other prisoners for his own protection, sheriff’s office spokeswoman Michelle Gavin said. He hasn’t been indicted yet.

Nancy’s daughters are living with her parents in the small wooden home on Savannah’s eastside where she grew up. The girls began seeing a therapist a few days after the murder. They started school Monday.

The man they used to call “daddy,” they’ll only refer by his full name, “Kenneth Sanders,” or as “the monster Kenneth Sanders,” according to Laurel, Nancy’s sister.

Eddie Sanders said his son claims to have blacked out on the afternoon of July 23. He understands Nancy is dead, Eddie Sanders said, but doesn’t remember doing it. He’s worried about what’s going to happen to their house. Eddie expects it will go back to the bank.

Four days after the murder, Eddie Sanders filed a burglary report with Port Wentworth police. He said he went to the house to get some belongings Kenneth had asked for and found a TV, a computer, several leather jackets, all the girls’ clothes, $200 and some paperwork missing.

According to the police report, Tim Bruin said he took everything but the $200. Tim said in an interview with the Savannah Morning News that the things he took were Nancy’s.

Grass grows tall in the lawn of 49 Old Mill Road. The porch lights burn in the middle of the day. Candles, stuffed animals and dead flowers sit on the doorstep. There are bloodstains on the wall and a little girl’s red plastic chair.

Marrero left a card at the door.

“I’m not sure what to do,” the card reads. “I’m not sure what to say. But one thing’s for sure — I promise to pray.”